It’s a pleasure to rise in the chamber today to speak on an issue of paramount importance to people in Ontario, to patients in Ontario and especially the northern and rural communities in our province.

I speak today, of course, as the member of provincial Parliament for Don Valley East, but also has an emergency and family physician that has worked throughout the province, and in particular, for a large part of my career, in northern, rural and remote Ontario. I can say first-hand, from having helped my patients, helped to navigate them through this process, I can speak to the urgent and pressing need for us to look at how we can improve it, because if we don’t, it will, unfortunately, impact clinical care and patient outcomes.

I want to start by outlining the five principles of medicare: comprehensiveness, universal, portable, publicly administered and accessible. It doesn’t matter if we have the best health care in the world in Toronto or in Ottawa; if you live in Moose Factory and can’t access it, we are not honouring the spirit of the Canada Health Act—frankly, the letter of the law, of the Canada Health Act—until we make sure that health care in our province is accessible.

What we know right now, based upon the Auditor General’s report on northern hospitals just released about two and a half months ago, on December 6, 2023: There is a significant imbalance in health care access between the north and the south. Not only that, the Auditor General identified that that significant imbalance is only expected to accelerate because of worsening staffing shortages. And yet, even going beyond that, the pressing need to address the Northern Health Travel Grant is only more relevant as we face in our province an affordability crisis, as we face a government that has introduced repeated waves of legislation that will centralize a variety of government services, including, under Bill 60, health care services that will drain surgeries and health care access from rural communities into urban communities.

And then, of course—and very relevant to something that just happened—as we see the growing spectre of climate change, that will make it more difficult for people to travel. We just learned a week or two ago that a number of northern communities declared a state of emergency because their ice roads are melting. When I worked in Moose Factory, those ice roads were a vital pipeline for patients to be able to come down to Moose Factory and continue their travel onto other places. For all of these reasons, we can expect that the travel, which is already expensive, will only become more expensive.

The people of our great north are not an afterthought. They have value. They contribute immensely to our history, our culture, our heritage and our province’s prosperity, and they need to be treated as such. When they can’t get access to the health care that they need, this is what happens: They don’t apply for the grants, because they don’t believe that they’re going to get it, and their health suffers. They apply and they’re denied, so their health suffers. Or they apply, they’re denied, and they appeal, and eventually, they’re approved, but in the process, their health suffers. Their health outcomes go down, and it ultimately becomes more expensive for all of us.

What the member from Algoma–Manitoulin has proposed is very fair. There is no reason that anyone could possibly disagree with this. He’s not saying, by some edict, let’s give everyone $10,000 or $100,000—no. He’s saying, let’s strike a committee that will look at the challenges that northern communities and northern patients face right now and look at ways, through those consultations, to improve the Northern Health Travel Grant. For a government that says that it is for the people, there could be no better suggestion for how to improve that health travel grant than by speaking to the people.

We have a grant that is well-intentioned. I can tell you from my own clinical experience working with a large number of patients throughout northern Ontario that the grant isn’t meeting their needs. We have a very reasonable proposal to show the patients of northern Ontario and rural Ontario that they are not an afterthought. I hope everyone can support this.